In recent years, electronic document delivery systems, such as Electronic Mail (E-mail), have become a conventional means for communicating in business and non-business environments. Initially, limited network resources restricted message content. However, recent advances in network infrastructure have made fast networks generally available. This has fostered support for delivery systems that support sending and receiving large amounts of data, e.g., file attachments, Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) embedded data, complex HyperText Markup Language (HTML) formatting, etc., along with traditional text messages.
While such capabilities are convenient, the aggregate effect of sending large electronic documents is significant negative impact on network performance. In some circumstances, a network and/or its delivery system (e.g., mail handling software/hardware) may be disabled due to an inability to process large amounts of data being sent electronically. For example, in an E-mail system, if a large message is sent to a distribution list, this often results in many copies of the same data being sent over the network, and being stored in recipient mailboxes. This can quickly exhaust storage resources.
To compensate, one solution has been to embed links to data in an electronic document, instead of embedding or attaching the data itself to the electronic document. For example, in an E-mail context, one may embed Uniform Locators (URLs) linking to data within an E-mail message, instead of attaching that data to the message. This allows a single data copy to reside on the network, while also allowing numerous recipients opportunity to access the data without appreciable impact to resources.
Unfortunately, this solution gives rise to a link management problem. Since received links may be embedded in many different electronic documents, it is difficult to track and organize them. For example, in order to access linked data within a particular E-mail message, a user must first locate the particular E-mail message containing a desired link. This can be a tedious search process when there is a lot of mail. Or, if the user desires all links received concerning a particular topic, the user has to search all messages since there is no cross-referencing of links to particular topics.
In addition, notwithstanding difficulty in locating links, although some E-mail readers provide for retaining offline copies of E-mail messages (e.g., Microsoft Outlook), no provision is made to retain offline copies of data linked within a message. When offline, if one activates (e.g., clicks or equivalent) a link, the linked data is not available. In addition, linked data might change, causing archived emails to lose context. There is no way to snapshot or archive complete data related to a message.